At leefish.nl, there was recently a Secret Scuba event – you know, like Secret Santa, except you were scuba and scubee instead of santa and santee. We’re all fish of the same pond after all. 🙂 This is the second – and final – part of my gifts; the first one can be found here.

One of the things my scubee Jo wished for was a blacksmith’s crafting station for her medieval game, which made me squee with delight because I am ever so slightly insane. So I promptly extracted the blacksmith’s anvil from TSM (and tweaked the textures a bit to make them look more TS2-y), cloned the OFB robot making station, and combined the two into a crafting station anvil where your medieval smiths can make… robots? Yeah, that didn’t make much sense to me, either – so I threw in some period-appropriate default replacements for the bots as well.

I’ve seen people on the ‘Net refer to this as a “default replacement station” a few times, so I want to stress that the anvil is NOT a default replacement for the robot crafting station, but a stand-alone object. Only the bots are default replacements – and they’re completely optional, you do not need them for the anvil to work.

I repeat: The anvil is NOT a default replacement for the robot crafting station! It is a stand-alone object!

Now, if we’re all clear on that. 😉 Since my scubee had all EPs installed and this was made for her, the anvil requires OFB and FT. I might make an OFB-only version later, but for now, you need both.

Update, 14 June, 2017: Downloader beradan has reported that the DR bots conflict with a mod for buyable craftables (that may or may not be this one); nothing will crash, but the bots won’t display properly if you have this mod installed. It might be possible to solve this by load order (i.e. having my bots load last), but I haven’t yet been able to check this myself. Just a heads up, in case the bots aren’t behaving as advertised in your game.

Thank you, beradan, for the report! ⭐

The anvil comes with three recolours for the anvil itself and five for the water barrel:

As your blacksmith sets about his crafting, the water in the barrel will begin to bubble and a piece of metal will magically appear to be placed on the anvil by… a butterfly. Because everybody knows how strong butterflies were in medieval times. 😛

His name is Hunk Smith. I’m like that sometimes.

Also, as you may have noticed in the title pic, your smith won’t be using a spanner and a screwdriver when making his item, but a mallet and a tong (also extracted from TSM). It seemed more appropriate for a blacksmith, not to mention less present day.

But what is he making? Well, like I said I’ve made default replacements for all the bots (again extracted from TSM) to make them more period-appropriate. So:

The toy robot is now a toy knight.

The HydroBot has become an Ambling Water Bucket.

The CleanBot is a Floating Broom.

The SentryBot is a Soaring Sword.

No action shots of this one, sorry – the ‘hood burglars refused to cooperate and do their dirty deeds.

And the MunchieBot has turned into a Flying Cooking Pot.

I could not come up with a good explanation for how the cooking pot is carrying the food, so let’s just say it’s magic.
I mean, it’s a flying cooking pot; realism’s pretty much been put out of the running already.

(BTW, if you don’t want your medieval Sims to control their bots with a plastic remote with green lights? I recommend my DR remote controls found in this post.)

The bots’ base stations are invisible – and I do mean invisible, they don’t even have a sun shadow – so you’ll need to make a note of where you put them if you want to move them around and/or set them for sale in an OFB lot, since it’s the base station you need to aim for to do that and not the actual bot. But in case you forget where they are, the tile directly beneath where the bot is hovering is always a safe bet. 😉

Known Issues

If you tell your Sim to start making a bot, and then immediately cancel the action from the queue before the material has spawned, the bubbles will still begin to bubble, and they won’t stop until you make another bot (or at least allow the material to spawn before cancelling). I tried everything I could think of to fix this, to no avail, so for you indecisive impatient types there is a menu option to “remove stuck bubbles” in case this happens. (Note that this menu option will show even if there aren’t any stuck bubbles to remove.)

Also – and this isn’t so much an issue as it is an annoyance – everything still has the original sounds, so things are whirring and clicking and humming in a very non-medieval way. I couldn’t fix this, either, sorry. (Yes, I do know how to remove the sound from an animation, but to be able to do it I have to find the darned sound first, and I couldn’t this time.)

Heehee, thank you! This was fun – and so was Hunk. 😉 I’m actually going to upload him later, he’s turned out to be quite the popular guy. I’m on my not-simming netbook right now (Win 8 with Intel graphics… yeah, I’m not even going to try), but as soon as I’m back on my big computer, Hunk will be going up. 🙂

The broom and the toy knight are my favourites. ;D The broom actually looks like it’s sweeping, sort of. And the little knight… what he lacks in size, he certainly makes up for with fervour.

Charity322 said,

Although, I don’t have a medieval neighbourhood, so my robot making sims will be very unimpressed if I take their robots away. Is there a way to make the items made from this not replace the robots made from the robot bench? i.e. so you use this bench for floating brooms etc. and the normal robot bench still makes robots.

Having a bench make custom craftables can be done, but it’s quite complex and I’m honestly not sure if it’s something I can do. 😦 I’d be happy to try, though, because it would be great (not to mention much more versatile) if these were custom objects instead of default replacements, no argument there. 🙂

So… I guess the answer to your question is “I’ll give it a go, but I won’t guarantee anything and I don’t know how long it’ll take?” 😛

Charity322 said,

Maybe you aren’t aware, but I’ve been on hiatus from simming for several months, to deal with some health issues, and have only very recently started to get back into the swing of things. That’s why there hasn’t been any uploads here since mid July. (The haystack is actually something I’d finished before I went on hiatus, I just didn’t get to write up the post until now.) So no, I haven’t had any luck with this – I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. 🙂

I’ve got good news and bad news. I’ve talked to Rebecah, and kind and generous simmer that she is she says I can use the BHAVs from her candle maker. 😀 So thanks to her, I will indeed be able to create an anvil that makes custom items…

…just not custom bots. 😦 They’ve turned out to be a heckuva lot more complex than I had expected them to be, and so far I haven’t been able to clone one successfully. It’s very possible they’re among the objects that can’t be cloned (for one thing I know there are some controllers missing from the catalogue, and you need those). So, other custom items, yes, but custom bots, no. Sorry. 😥

Charity322 said,

You’re welcome, and I’m sorry I couldn’t pull it off, because custom bots would have been awesome. (I have this little idea that it might – huge might – be possible to use some of the bot BHAVs with another object and make kind of a low-budget bot, that isn’t as complex as the real ones… but it might very well be one of those things that only works in my head. 😛 It isn’t anything I’m up to attempting now, but some day I might. If only to get the idea out of my head. 😉 )

Hee! 😀 Sims are not my forte, they usually end up looking like Face #2 no matter what I do, but I quite like how this one came out. On the off chance that you want him in your game, he’s up for download here.

vojtulle said,

Hey, this is awesome! it lloks gr8 🙂 i have little problem tho, that i cant assign employee to this, is that ok? and the other is that the bucket is weirdly blue, a quess its missing texture or something can i do something about those things? thx 🙂

THANK YOU for reporting this! I have no idea what happened with the water bucket, the version I have in my game (and that I thought was the one I’d uploaded) works just fine – but I checked the one I have here, and sure enough, that bucket flashes blue. 😳 It should be fixed now, so please redownload the bots and let this HydroBot replace the one you have. Sorry about the inconvenience!

It’s funny, but almost 300 people have downloaded the default bots, and surely some of them must have noticed this issue before, but you’re the only one who’s actually bothered to report it. I do test my objects thoroughly, but I’m only human and I can (obviously) miss something – but there’s no way for me to know I have if nobody let’s me know they’ve found a problem. So again, THANK YOU! Keep on bein’ awesome. 😀

As for assigning employees, this unfortunately I can’t fix. I’ve seen the same problem with other custom crafting stations and I have a tentative theory about what’s causing it, but if I’m right then it’s not something I can do anything about (and if I’m no right, then I don’t know what else it might be). So the closest I can get to “fixing” this is to remove the “Assign” option altogether to avoid confusion. Sorry. 😦

nonni222 said,

Thanks, Nonni!! It makes me feel quite a bit better to hear you didn’t get a blue bucket. Then maybe I don’t suck at testing all of those 300 people didn’t keep mum about the problem after all, but simply didn’t have a problem to report. 😀

But… if I don’t have a blue bucket on my computer, and you didn’t get a blue bucket when you downloaded yours, but vojtulle did when they downloaded theirs (and I did, too, when I dl’d it to check)… then what in the world happened to corrupt my file between then and now? And how? Before now, I hadn’t touched it since I uploaded it. Mystified Nix is mystified. ❓

vojtulle said,

RAWRRRrrrrROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I STILL get a kick outta this! I’m just now getting around to DL’ing it (and ALL your other fabulous finds!!!) so I haven’t actually seen it live in game yet! BUT…!!!!!!!!!! I just totally luv your pics! 😉 And that ‘magical’ broom and bucket, not to mention all the other goodies, makes me think of Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ movie! With the sorcerer and his lil apprentice! 😀

Luv, Love, LOOOVE IT!!!!!!!

Ya know, after playing ts3 for a whole year plus, ‘graphically’ it’s hard to come back to ts2. BUT!!! 3 REALLY lacks sooo many fun and lovable interactions that 2 DOES have!!! (Can you say snuggle & huggle?! Just to name 2 that I TOTALLY luv about ts2!) 😉

Chicklet said,

Thank you!!!!! I have only just discovered your site (came over from medieval sims) and I am in love with your stuff. Especially this. The bubbles you call an error? Sounds perfect! How sorcerer’s apprentice! Bubbles going everywhere, telling on the apprentice….

First and foremost: Welcome! 😀 I’m delighted that you like my stuff, I have lots of fun making it. This in particular was fun – frustrating at times (self-referencing BHAVs, that’s all I’m sayin’), but fun. 🙂 And I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right, it is very sorcerer’s apprentice! Hee! (And now I have this picture of bubbles filling every room of the sorcerer’s tower, even though the poor apprentice is valiantly trying to shoo them off with his flying broom before the sorcerer sees them…)

Ah, that would be because you’re trying to set the bot for sale, when you need to do it with the base station. (Maxis’ idea, not mine; the changes I’ve made are all just cosmetic, I haven’t touched any functions.) So, don’t aim for the bot itself, but go for the ground beneath it and a little off to the side; that’s where the base station is and you’ll be able to set it for sale.

I’ll clarify this in the post, just in case others are having problems as well. I guess I could whip up an alternate base station replacement as well, that is a pile of logs or a crate or somesuch – something visible, at any rate – for people who don’t like/want the completely invisible one, but I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, so I can’t say when that might happen.

Yeah, that’s the downside to the base station being completely invisible, you have to feel your way to find it. (And IIRC the base is a bit skimpy, I probably should have made it bigger.) But stay close to the ground rather than close to the bot, and you should get there. 🙂

beradan said,

Hi Nix! I’m sure I’m overlooking something *blindingly* obvious, but I cannot for the life of me get the DR bots to show up in game. I’ve got the recolors/textures, but not the shapes. The file is properly unzipped, and while I’m not 100% certain they’re the only DR for the bots in my CC folder, they’d definitely be the last loaded. Any suggestions you have would be wonderful!

That’s very weird that you’re just getting the textures and not the meshes; they’re in the same package, so I’d expect you to get either both, or neither. (I’m not doubting you, absolutely not, it’s just one weird error. ) And it sounds to me like you’ve done everything you should, you’ve unzipped the files and checked load order, and there’s not much else you can do. Which of course only make things weirder. But Strange Things have happened to these files before (like the water bucket textures somehow becoming corrupted whilst they were just sitting on the server), so I downloaded the bots from here and popped them into an AnyGame they haven’t been to before… and they showed up perfectly fine. Which isn’t a good thing in this case, since I can’t troubleshoot what I can’t replicate.

So I’m afraid I don’t have any brilliant suggestions for you. 😦 Just to be on the safe side, though, I’ve rezipped and reuploaded the bots, just in case some Strange Things had happened to the file that I didn’t pick up. So, redownload and try again? I’m sorry, but that’s the best I can do.

beradan said,

Thanks for reporting back! And yay! 😀 I’m v. glad to hear you fixed it, and even gladder to hear the problem wasn’t me. 😉

Could it be this mod from MTS? I know there are some problems with that one, and considering how it was made (the creator extracted the entire object instead of just the resources they needed to change), I can easily see it interfering with DR’s.

I’m going to add a warning at the beginning of the post, so other downloaders will know it conflicts. Thank you very much for telling me!